About

Usually at 2am you’d find me in a basement, cutting fabric. 

But now, while 2am passed in London, I found myself perched on the steps of my beachfront villa in the Maldives.

I had booked a rare holiday from the alluring, yet ultimately unenviable, life as the owner of a young luxury menswear label.

While the sun bronzed me, pulling the ocean from my skin I relived the morning’s adventure beneath the waves. Above a swaying, fleshy forest a turtle calmly flew alongside me and a neon fish whipped between crags. Everything was peaceful.

My 11 days of peace on Kuredu island were just enough for me to realise I didn’t want to go back to the manufacturing mess ups, scattered supply chains, and physical stock.

I thought my retreat would be a comma in life, but it had become a full stop. My next sentence began, “Can I write my way into a copywriting job?”.

Writing was something I could do from anywhere and I'd recently read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Those two seemed like good enough reasons.

And so I set to it, rewriting my CV, implanting all the writing experience I’d ever had. Every article, webpage, and pitch. Anything where I could show I was good at words. 

From that tropical office I applied to two jobs before returning to the sea for the day’s final nautical theatre. 

Two weeks later I was back in a London basement.

But not the one I was tired of. The floor was not covered in thread or wool. I saw no shears, nor rolls of fabric.

This new basement was the underground part of a tech co-working space in Angel.

Opposite me sat a calm French poker champion, turned product genius [my turtle?] and a prophesying serial entrepreneur with a wild idea to revolutionise the UK property market [my neon fish?].

After 25 or so minutes my interview was coming to an end. We had finished the serious questions and were now chatting about my past in tailoring. But the neon fish had one last serious question.

“So, when can you start?”

“Tomorrow?” I said, partly out of surprise and partly because I thought that’s exactly what he wanted me to say.

“That’s exactly what I wanted you to say.”

And so, the next day, my first day writing for a living, I was given my first writing task. The rejection email to the 200 or so candidates I’d been vying against.

I had become a copywriter. 

Over the next seven years I sent armies of words to battle for attention and money.

At Wayhome, I shaped product market fit for a startup backed by £500M of institutional capital, convincing customers to trust their life savings with us.

My emails had 65%+ open rates and 7%+ click through rates.

As Penfriend’s co-founder, I designed and executed the launch campaign which delivered $41,674 in 24 hours, with over a third coming from top-tier yearly subscriptions.

The landing page had an outrageous 77% conversion rate (visitor to free trial), while the weekly newsletter had 40% to 60% open rates.

My copy launched Napo, a pet insurance startup, driving crucial early sales and product market fit that led to a £15M+ funding round.

And at Springer Nature Group, I led a content maturity overhaul, while also crafting in-app copy and sales funnels for the new product C-suite were betting the farm on.

I became both fascinated and obsessed with words.

Words as tools to make things happen.

I’d been red pilled on writing well and I felt compelled to help others see what I saw. My new mission was to stop bad copy from killing good ideas.

I began to crystallise my thoughts on writing well. Nothing made my ideas so clear as to bound them in black and white writing. Over many years I wrote my guide to (copy)writing well and began publishing parts of it on LinkedIn. In a single year I grew an audience of 48,600+ interested followers. 

But the student who learned the most about writing well was still me.

Still, I didn't think of myself as a copywriter.

Even though I called myself a copywriter, my clients called me a copywriter, I wrote a copywriting guide, and owned copywriting.io

I rarely write ads, I’ve never watched Mad Men, the Boron letters bored me, and I don’t have a favourite 1950s advert.

The title copywriter doesn’t do justice to the skill I discovered.

So what do I call myself?

I’ve yet to find a single suitable title. But I have narrowed my work into 11 jobs.

Yes I’m part writer, putting words onto the page. 

I’m also part editor with a default to deletion.

I kill repetition, redundancy, and boredom because the first draft is usually the worst draft.

I’m also an analyst of human behaviour because people are lazy (they look for shortcuts), vain (they look for acceptance), selfish (they’re trying to survive), and busy (they’re overwhelmed digitally, physically, financially, and emotionally).

I’m also part psychologist because people make decisions emotionally. Their lives are orchestrated by the fast, primal parts of their brain.

The monkey brain.

I’m also part scientist conducting experiments.

I make a hypothesis about which ideas and words might work, I write them down, I send them into the world, analyse the results, and make a new hypothesis.

I’m also part researcher considering who I write for, where they hang out, and what they care about because I need to understand which concepts and words may resonate.

I’m also part director because people are easily bored. I write trailers to capture my audience and scripts to captivate them because information can slip from the mind’s weak grasp.

I’m also part composer, considering the sounds of words.

I control the rhythm of sentences, the tempo, and the tone, because readers hear words and remember linguistic melodies.

I’m also part designer making sure my words are visually appealing because good copy needs to look readable before you can prove it is readable.

I’m also part navigator, guiding people through concept, people, time, and mood, because lost readers give up.

And perhaps most importantly, I’m also part entrepreneur because sometimes what seems like a word problem, is actually, at its root, a business problem.

You see my conundrum?

What am I?

I don’t write books so I’m not a writer.
I don’t write novels so I’m not a novelist.
I don’t write poetry so I’m not a poet.
I don’t write ads so I’m not a copywriter.

But still, I call myself a copywriter because it hints at sales, revenue, action, momentum, progress, and persuasion. I've had to meet the world where it's at to keep me housed, clothed, and fed.

I’m drawn to this quote by G. M. Young. 

Every time you want something to happen you’ll likely use words as your tool.

And so the words you choose, and the order you put them in, will affect the outcome. They will affect your future.

As I strolled to the underground station at Angel after my job interview with the turtle and the neon fish I knew I had written my way to this new adventure. I was dictating it, simply by controlling the tools of persuasion.  

Control words. Dictate the future.

John